I was just talking to someone about gifs and I wondered if they can be made in Gimp. I googled it and found some tuts. But I have a question:

Can you place small gifs into a larger gif?

eg. create a matchstick man riding a bike as a small gif, and another matchstick man walking a dog, and then place these together into a large gif of a scrolling background so it looks like both characters are moving in the same scene.

I know you could make one gif of all three elements, but if they are separate I could pick n mix the smaller elements with different backgrounds without having to redraw everything.

As you can see, I know nothing about this stuff - yet.

What's possible?

Mr. Greengoat

08-23-2009, 04:47 PM

Hmm, I am not the big GIMP expert but I think GIFs work like this:

Each of your smaller animated gifs have a number of "frames" that are enclosed in the file. Gimp would probably open each of these tiny images as separate images to edit.

What you would have to do is open your "large" gif with the main scene and cut and paste from the smaller gifs into the "frames" of the large gif. Kind of like pasting pages from a small flip-book into a larger flip-book.

That is just my guesstimate of what it takes.

Notsonoble

08-23-2009, 06:29 PM

Hmm, I am not the big GIMP expert but I think GIFs work like this:

Each of your smaller animated gifs have a number of "frames" that are enclosed in the file. Gimp would probably open each of these tiny images as separate images to edit.

What you would have to do is open your "large" gif with the main scene and cut and paste from the smaller gifs into the "frames" of the large gif. Kind of like pasting pages from a small flip-book into a larger flip-book.

That is just my guesstimate of what it takes.

That's pretty much how it works for animated gifs... when you open one in gimp, it shows each frame as a layer...

so what I would do is open one of the animated gifs in GIMP, then expand the canvas (image -> canvas size) to the size you need for all the animation you want. When doing this GIMP offers an option to resize layers, tell it to resize all of the layers...

Then open your other animated gifs in GIMP, and simply copy visible information into the appropriate layer on your resized gif... When you save it, it'll make the animation again, combining your gifs as one large animated gif...

RobA

08-23-2009, 09:07 PM

If you really want to do animations in Gimp, get GAP (Gimp Animation Package) which has a bunch of animation extras like setting speeds, looping, reversing frames, blending frames, etc.

-Rob A>

icosahedron

08-24-2009, 06:05 AM

Cheers guys,
I've been learning a bit more, even since posting above. I saw that frames all have to be the same size, but that canvas expansion trick looks like a useful workaround. I'll look into GAP too.

So far, it looks like I might be able to do what I have in mind. (makes a change, I'm usually frustrated by wanting to do the impossible) If so, I'll post the results here. :)